The Belize Reef

This summer I traveled to Belize as part of my graduate work through Miami University. Traveling abroad is always an incredible experience, and this particular trip was amazing for a few reasons. I traveled with a small group of students with my program; we did coursework, had discussions, and investigated small inquiry questions. We had the opportunity to see and learn about conservation work in Belize and met dedicated individuals who work to protect their local ecosystems.

In particular, I was most impressed and interested in the work that Belizeans have done to protect their marine ecosystems and the Mesoamerican reef. The Mesoamerican reef is the second largest reef system in the world, stretching along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras. The reef ecosystem nestles up next to mangroves and seagrass, creating complicated interconnections. Animals born in the mangroves, might grow up in the seagrass, then live their adult lives out on the reef.

Our trip included the opportunity to snorkel through each one of these ecosystems. We explored the muddy fog of the mangroves. I investigated the habitats of fish in the sea grasses. And I was absolutely awe-struck by the beauty and diversity of the reefs. On a night snorkel we saw octopus, one afternoon, a sea turtle. The next day, rays glided by. I’ve been lucky enough to have snorkeled and scuba-ed in some of the most beautiful places on earth, and these underwater adventures are certainly at the top of my list.

What might be most astounding about the reef, is the steps that Belize and Belizean people are taking to protect it. Before we arrived, the Belizean government passed legislation to ban offshore drilling and protect the reef (Green, 2018). The ecosystem still faces dangers from overfishing, pollution, and development, but in a time when caring about the environment can be hard, the ban is a win.

Belizean coral cover has declined 25-30% since the mid 1990s. This decline is linked to rising temperatures and ocean acidification - both of which will continue to rise with global climate change (Knowlton et al. 2018). The Smithsonian has a research center on Carrie Bow Cay. We had a chance to visit the field station and learn about the work researchers are doing to better understand coral. Researchers were flying into Belize from all over in hopes of being in the water at the exact moment when all of the corals mass spawn. One of the initially hopeful findings we learned is that coral young may not be affected as severely by ocean acidification as adult corals.

The Mesoamerican reef is an absolutely unique and incredible ecosystem. Belize’s section of it is home to hundreds of different fish species as well as turtles, rays, and corals. It is a feeding grounds for whale sharks, provides many essential ecosystem services and, perhaps most importantly, provides for the livelihood of many Belizeans. On our brief trip alone, we met people whose work is studying the reef, guiding tourists around the reef, catching fish from the reef, and making jewelry and artisan crafts with items collected from the reef.

Many people are working to understand and protect this special ecosystem. Having the opportunity to meet and talk with some of those dedicated people, was only overshadowed by the chance to experience the reef ecosystem for myself. It is a surreal and incredible thing to be able to glide through a world of colors, shapes, and atmosphere so different from the terra firma under my feet. I hope to do it again soon, and I hope others will have that same chance for many many many more years. Exploring the reef brings to mind the often quoted and often misquoted word of John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

References

Green, G. (2018, January 14). Belize bans oil activity to protect its barrier reef. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/jan/14/belize-bans-oil-activity-to-protect-reef-diving-tourism-belize-barrier-reef

Knowlton, N., NMNH, S., & Ocean Portal Team. (2018, July 20). Corals and Coral Reefs. Retrieved from https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/corals-and-coral-reefs

Wood, H. (n.d.). Quotations from John Muir. Retrieved from https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx

Indonesia by the numbers:

months in Indonesia: 9

grains of rice eaten: 720,000

students taught: 400

books read: 73

weddings attended: 8

islands visited: 11

dives logged: 10

mountains summitted: 2

  volcanoes fallen into: 0

encounters with wild primates: 4

An Ode to My Coffee Mug

O! Coffee mug
You are my long true friend
You wake me up
You keep me warm

For eight long years,
We've been together
Through early morning calculus
And late night art studios

You've roadtripped 'cross the country
Topped with gas station brew
The perfect pairing
With sunchips and M&Ms

We hiked together
Long miles through snowy mountains
And you gave me a reason
To leave students unchaperoned at showers

You've traveled round the world
By boat, by plane
Through deserts, between rice paddies, across rivers
Never spilling a drop of precious coffee

Work would be impossible
Without your comforts
My hands shake in your absence
I am sad when you are empty

Now I fear that you are aging
Metal dented, bright paint peeling
But you still warm my drinks
You will always wake me up


Three Haikus (About my Coffee Mug)

My hand's perfect fit
a safety, vacuum seal lid
hot coffee won't spill

Black lid, red body
ever a coffee mug, you
change the taste of tea

I've rarely washed you
intensifying flavor
perhaps not my health

*All of this was written during Monday's morning meeting. Today, learning about the exciting topic of Indonesian income tax regulations.

With about three more weeks of living in Indonesia, I'm finding myself thinking a lot about this experience. I am already nostalgic for something that is still happening. Yet, I also find myself perplexed, because I don't exactly know what is happening, or more to the point, what I have done.

We had our final official conference as a group of ETAs a few weeks ago. It left me wondering what I've achieved by living in Samarinda for nine months. The most obvious answer is: not much. When I think about my experience, the highlights that immediately come to mind are scuba diving with manta rays, visions of perfectly green rice paddies, and watching my family try gado-gado. It is more difficult to understand the impact of teaching 400 students, when I only see each class for 90 minutes each week. It is unknowable the impact of having small conversations during angkot rides or buying pineapple from the same sweet ibu every week. I'm sure the geckos I talk to won't remember a thing about me.

I'm left wondering: did I improve my students' English? Did I affect Indonesians' understandings of my country?

I know that I'm asking unanswerable questions, not easily-answerable, at least. But this has been a job without much oversight, feedback, or quantifiable results. I don't know what I've accomplished, because the program never made it clear what I was supposed to do.

I am happy to be going home. I'm excited to see family and friends, to eat cheese, bake pies, and drink water out of the tap. Yet, I have a difficult time accepting the loose ends of leaving. I suppose understanding of these sorts of skin-stretching experiences takes time and acceptance that it might come in unexpected ways. The work of cross-cultural exchange is not one that ends simply because I step onto an airplane.

Before I lived in Borneo, I worked at an outdoor science school in the mountains of Southern California.  Each week, buses of 5^th and 6^th grade students drove up into the San Bernardino National Forest for an educational week of learning about science as it actually happens around them. To this day, I can’t think of a better way to get a student interested in the world around them. I just wish we could have kept them there for more than a week (well, most of them) so they could’ve learned what I learned in a year and a half at High Trails. Instead, I distilled my lessons down into key points about the heart rate of a hibernating squirrel, how a platypus feeds it babies, and the idea that everybody shares the responsibility of taking care of the environment (“We are not passengers on planet earth….”)

Speechifying about environmentalism was a big part of the job. I took kids to trash-covered parts of the forest and showed them lots of depressing pictures of polar bears watching their homes melt away. Every week, we got dressed up in silly costumes and acted out Dr. Suess’s The Lorax – surely an epic, yet heartwarming tale if I’ve ever heard one. We were, of course, not entirely paradigms of green living. I did drive my car on weekends, sometimes just so I could buy clothes made cheaply by underpaid workers in the country I’m currently living in, but we tried.

I look around Samarinda now, and it is hard to believe that anyone is trying. There is trash everywhere. Plastic wrappers and bottles pile up along the sides of the streets and they clog up the drainage rivers around the city. Outside of the city, things get worse, that’s where the big companies are cutting down the trees, strip mining the forest, and pumping out tons of oil every day. Samarinda’s famous river dolphin is nearly extinct. I don’t have a single student that has ever seen one.

Yet, it is not like anyone is simply unaware of the situation. A few weeks ago, the focus of our English classes was on the environment and sustainability. My students already knew all the words, they know about the issues. We practiced writing polling questions and then asking the opinions of everybody in class. All of my students agreed that the government should do more to protect endangered species; they believe that air pollution is a problem in their city; and they think that recycling is important. Ask them if they’ve actually recycled a plastic bottle and you get a completely different response. Because there is no recycling center in Samarinda. Because in a city of one million people, where the only way to get clean drinking water is to get it out of a plastic bottle, there is no way to recycle that plastic bottle.

There are people and organizations working to counter these issues. There are NGOs dedicated to protecting Borneo’s biodiversity. My neighbor works for the Indonesian government’s forestry department and works on projects that focus on reboisasi – replanting trees.

In the past few decades, lots of people have moved to Kalimantan because it’s not as crowded as other parts of Indonesia (Java). There are jobs here because there are so many resources. There isn’t nearly as much poverty as I’ve seen in other parts of the country. I work at a nice, well-funded school. My students have blackberries. Their parents have cars.

Outside of the city, some farmers are experiencing record-low yields, likely because of the polluted water they use on their crops. People get sick because of pollution in the water and the air. People are also making more money so they can afford access to better health care and food from other places. These may not be the same groups of people.

It is frustrating. I don’t know what people can do without better infrastructure. I don’t know how they’ll build up recycling programs or water treatment programs or public transportation without a government that is more responsive to those issues (and less corrupt). And every time I think about it, I remember that I feel the exact same frustrations when I’m home in the U.S.

I don’t have a good feel-good ending for this post. I don’t drive a car anymore, but I fly on airplanes all the time. Most of my food is grown locally, but it is certainly not anywhere close to organic. I have 3 plastic bags full of plastic bottles in my house, because I can’t yet stand to burn them in the fire pit in my front yard.

I do wonder what students learned about environmentalism from this...

The Lorax

When I started studying Indonesian, one of the first things I learned was the derivation of the word “orangutan.” Orang means person; I tell people I am an “orang America” an American person. Or I might say that my friend is an “orang baik” a good, nice person.  The word hutan means “forest.” So orang-utan means “person of the forest.”

The term orang hutan was probably originally used to refer to real people living in the forest, but during the 17^th century, some European scientists used the word in descriptions of Indonesian zoology, to describe the apes living in the forests of Borneo, and apparently it stuck.

Orangutans are super cool. They are big and orange and they can swing through the trees. A male can grow to be almost 6 ft tall, can weigh up to 260 pounds, and grows enormous face flaps around his chin to show dominance. The ladies don’t get quite as big, (4 ft tall, 100lbs) and they don’t grow the crazy jowls, but like the males they have strong, flexible hands and feet, and opposable thumbs and toes so they swing through the jungle trees with ease.

They even sleep up in the trees! They build themselves a nest to sleep in every night, pulling in big strong branches to form a foundation, and weaving in smaller, leafier branches to build a sort of mattress.

Orangutans, like lots of apes, are smart. They can use tools, like iPads.

The downside, is that they are also a endangered animal. Though different species of orangutan could once be found in many parts of Southeast Asia, those remaining in the wild now live solely in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra. The population in Sumatra is listed as critically endangered and the Borneo population is endangered. The Bornean orangutan population has decreased by 50% in the past sixty years. As logging, mining, and palm oil businesses have expanded, the area in which the orangs live has been drastically reduced. In East Kalimantan, where I live, estimates say there are less than 5,000 left.

It’s difficult to say if things are getting better or worse for the orangutans here in Borneo. Certainly the big businesses aren’t slowing down, but there does seem to be a greater push toward sustainable logging that might preserve some of the orang habitat. There are organizations that work to protect them and it is no longer legal to sell them (which is not to say it doesn't happen anyways). One of the teachers I work with has told me about the pet orangutan she had when her children were young. They bought it at the market and raised it as a pet for her kids to play with. Her son’s face lit up remembering the good old days playing with his orangutan pal. Nobody seems to want to explain to me where that orangutan might be now and they all laughed when I asked if I could buy one to take home as a souvenir. If its small and cute now, it’ll stay that way forever, right?

I've wanted to see an orangutan since I found out I’d be moving to Borneo. A few months ago, I went to the Samarinda zoo to do just that. While we did see some real live orangutans it was under the most heartbreaking conditions I could imagine. In one open area, there were three, skinny orange apes, who looked like they were desperately trying to hide from the people with cameras, all gleefully ignoring the signs reading “dilarang memberi makanan binatang” and throwing in food. There was a big male, in a small cage, huddled up into himself. Worst of all, in the last cage was a tiny baby, scrawny and alone. Needless to say, I've not been back to the zoo.

Last weekend, a couple friends and I headed up north to try and see orangutans in the wild. We took a bus and a car and a boat deep into the jungles of Kutai National Park, a protected area. As our guide landed the boat at what would be our rustic jungle home, he pointed way up into the tree to a big male orangutan, putting together his nest, and snuggling in. He was so high up in the tree, I couldn't make out much more than a dark shape with deft hands.

We hiked that evening and saw no other signs or orangutans.

We hiked the next morning and saw no signs of orangutans. But we did see and feel plenty of mosquitoes and leeches, so we knew we really were out in the jungle. We crossed rickety bridges over muddy streams. I cursed my inability to take a photograph that captured the jungly-ness of the jungle. And we still didn’t see any orangutans.

In town we’d been told that since it is rambutan season and orangutans love to eat fruit, we’d have a good chance of seeing them around camp. When we got to camp, our guide told us there really wasn’t much fruit around. I began to lose hope.

We set out for a third trek into the jungle in the late afternoon. We crossed bridges that were really just branches. We got muddy. I was just bending down to take a picture of a cool fungus when our guide stopped, shushed us, and pointed up into the trees. Way up in the canopy was a bright orange baby orangutan swinging from branch to branch, his mama followed close behind.

For almost an hour mother and baby swung around in the trees above us. I filled a memory card on my camera with pictures of bright green leaves and blurry orange shapes.

Our guide. Orangutan-whisperer

It was incredible to see. And it was almost made better by the fact that she’d been so hard to find. To be in the jungles of Borneo, watching a mama orangutan and her baby, I felt so very lucky. I gave up taking pictures and just watched. Sometimes mama moved with the baby clinging tightly to her back and sometimes the little one made his own way. They were graceful and strong. I loved watching the interaction between mother and child, making up the dialogue for it in my head “But Mom! I want to go play in that tree!”

Mama and baby

"I can do it myself, Mom!"

Orangey-brown orangutan blur

Eventually, as the light changed, and we heard the faint sounds of the evening call to prayer, the orangutan started to build her nighttime nest and we turned back for home. 

The day after the funeral, we packed up for three days and two nights of hiking around the Torajan highlands.  My backpack was the size of the one a 3rd grader might take to elementary school and my friend  was recovering from a serious back injury, so we managed to pack very light: clothes to sleep in, sunscreen, bugspray, and a toothbrush. And of course a camera, because this trek was mostly spend taking pictures and yelling every time we came around a bend, "oh my god! it actually gets prettier!"

Walking is one of my favorite activities. So is talking with a good friend about all of life's possibilities and laughing every time I ended up knee-deep in mud. And for whatever reason, I have an aesthetic obsession with rice paddies, that only grows if the rice paddies are terraced up hillsides. Add all that together and I ended up with an amazing trip.

Traditional Torajan houses. Called Tongkonon. They have saddle-backed roofs and elaborate paintings.

This particular house was over 700 years old, you can still see the paintings behind the leafy overgrowth.

It was so pretty.

Really really pretty.

Ughhh. So pretty. And we ended up with miraculously perfect weather. Trekking during the rainy season, but it only poured in the evening. Both times about 5 minutes after we safely made it to shelter.

It was a perfect trip. We had an excellent guide who led us through rice fields and bamboo forests. We stayed the night in one of the traditional houses, sleeping up in a loft under the arced roof. We met a lot of nice people who graciously let us meander through their fields. 

Toraja is an absolutely beautiful part of Indonesia. I left feeling so happy and so lucky that I live here.